Witness Faces Trial for Murder Seen, Then Unseen

DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

Sunday

Jul 29, 2007 at 5:45 AM

A witness to a Newark gang killing who changed his story now faces prison time for the sin of being scared silent.

NEWARK, July 24 — For two years, Reginald Roe was the star — and sole — witness prosecutors were relying on in an ambush gang killing in a parking lot here, having picked two men’s pictures out of a photo array and sworn before a grand jury: “I saw everything. I was there.”

But when the case came to trial, with a phalanx of gang members glaring at him in open court, Mr. Roe changed his story, testifying that he had heard the shots but never saw who fired them. The two suspects were acquitted.

Now Mr. Roe is the criminal defendant, facing up to three years in prison for the sin of being scared silent. Charged with making a false statement, he is Exhibit A in law enforcement’s increasingly desperate war on witness intimidation in cities plagued by gang violence. His is one of a small but growing cadre of cases nationally in which angry and frustrated prosecutors are turning the tables on witnesses who recant.

“Without reliable witnesses, a criminal justice system just can’t function,” said Paula Dow, the Essex County prosecutor. “So the public has to know that for us to help them, they have to be willing to testify. And if they testify untruthfully, there will be consequences.”

Ms. Dow said her office was taking such a hard line against Mr. Roe to deter others who are reluctant to testify or who change their stories. In this case, the two suspects remained on the street, and were implicated in two murders stemming from a bar fight six months after the slaying of Michael Taylor in 2004. The police said those two killings were followed the same day by two retaliatory killings by a rival gang.

In a series of recent interviews, Mr. Roe, 27, said that while he considers those four deaths tragic, he does not bear responsibility, noting that the two suspects remained at large after Mr. Taylor’s killing though the police had recovered the murder weapon.

“If the police can’t lock up a killer even when they have the gun,” he asked, “what are the rest of us supposed to do?”

Mr. Roe, who has “MOB” and “Born to Hustle” tattooed on his arms, said he had never been in a gang, though he has friends and relatives in the Crips and the Bloods. Before he witnessed the shooting of Mr. Taylor, he had pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon and possession of stolen property in separate cases, but the authorities said nothing in his record suggested gang activity.

Born in Newark and raised in nearby Orange, he has spent the past three years shuttling back and forth to South Carolina, where he attended technical school before dropping out.

A month after his May 2006 trial testimony, the house where he was living with his mother and grandmother burned down. The authorities found drug paraphernalia nearby and said it was most likely caused by someone heating narcotics, but the Roe family suspects arson.

And since his indictment in September, Mr. Roe said, he has lost jobs at a cable television company and as a security guard because of revelations about his criminal record. He still dreams of becoming an agent for athletes or hip-hop stars, but lately stays sporadically with friends and relatives here and out of state, trying to keep a low profile for fear of retaliation.

“Most of the people know me on the street and know I’m cool,” he said in a recent interview. “But when they put your name on the front page of the paper saying you’ve got something to do with a Bloods murder case, you never know what kind of rumors are going to start.”

Revisiting the crime scene, Mr. Roe said the most terrifying moment that night was not when a gang member pointed a gun at his head and threatened to “push his wig back,” slang for shooting him in the head. It was not, he said, sitting a few yards away as Michael Taylor, a drug dealer known as Mike Jesus, had five bullets pumped into his back.

Mr. Roe said he was not truly consumed by fear until the police brought him in for questioning.

“Everybody in the neighborhood could see them put me in the back of the police car, and they’re probably thinking I’m helping the detectives,” Mr. Roe recalled. “And I’m saying to myself, ‘Uh-oh, a lot of people get killed in Newark for snitching.’ ”

A Killer With Dreadlocks

Some elements of Mr. Roe’s story have remained consistent.

He and his cousin Shakir Phelps were sitting in a car on Peshine Avenue next to the parking lot just before midnight, waiting to meet up with some women. As a group of 8-year-olds played with firecrackers in the parking lot, two men — one with dreadlocks, the other bald — approached the car asking if they had seen Mike Jesus.

The man with the dreadlocks then forced his way into Mr. Phelps’s white Ford Taurus and pulled a Glock semiautomatic pistol. After about two minutes, Mr. Taylor arrived in the parking lot, and the gunman and his accomplice left the Taurus. “It was good timing for me and my cousin,” Mr. Roe said in a recent interview, “but bad timing for Mike.”

The first time he was questioned, about four hours after the murder, Mr. Roe said he had clearly seen the man with dreadlocks fire the fatal shots, according to a police summary of the interview, and would definitely recognize him if he saw him again. (Mr. Phelps, who told the police he had seen nothing, declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Within days, investigators received tips that Kareem Upshaw and Anthony Pearson, Bloods members known as “Kiz” and “Iz,” had carried out the shooting. Detectives reached out to Mr. Roe to confirm the identities, but they discovered that he had given them a false name — Richard Remy — and address.

They tracked him down five months later, through another of Mr. Roe’s cousins who is a Newark police officer.

On Nov. 18, Mr. Roe was shown two photo arrays and picked out Mr. Upshaw, a high-ranking member of the Gangster Killer Bloods who has long dreadlocks, and Mr. Pearson, who is bald.

He told the investigators he had been evasive before because he feared for his life, but had decided to tell the truth to clear his conscience.

“I’m setting my life straight,” he said, according to the November police report. “I went away to school and I’m trying to live right now, and I know it was wrong about what happened.” But in an interview this month, Mr. Roe gave another explanation.

“The police told me they had found the gun, so I’d never need to testify,” he said. “It wasn’t until later that they told me that they couldn’t find any fingerprints on it, so I had to take the stand.”

Despite Mr. Roe’s statement, Mr. Upshaw and Mr. Pearson were not arrested, because of a policy in the Essex County prosecutor’s office, born of the intimidation epidemic, to avoid moving forward in most instances on cases based on a single eyewitness. It was a policy that would come back to haunt prosecutors.

On Dec. 14, four people were fatally shot in succession on Newark streets. The police eventually traced all four killings back to a fight the night before at a bar, Mercedes and Mink, in which Mr. Upshaw suffered a black eye.

According to later court testimony, two of the murders were carried out by Mr. Upshaw’s gang lieutenants, and two were retaliatory killings by rival gangs.

Mr. Roe, in South Carolina, heard about Mr. Upshaw’s role in the killings that occurred the day after the bar fight, and began to get word that members of the Bloods were angry with him. A friend told him that his name was being whispered in the cellblocks of the Essex County jail.

“People were saying that I’m with the police,” he recalled, “and I knew right then I had to watch my back.”

Still, six months later, at a proceeding not open to the public, Mr. Roe told the grand jury that he had watched Mr. Upshaw and Mr. Pearson walk across the parking lot with Mr. Taylor toward the corner of an apartment building.

“Once they hit that corner, that’s when the guy with the dreads started shooting,” he testified, adding that the police had not threatened him or promised him anything in exchange for his testimony.

But when he was called as a trial witness in May 2006, with Mr. Upshaw, Mr. Pearson and their gang comrades in the courtroom, Mr. Roe reversed himself, saying he did not know for sure who fired the shots.

Defense lawyers asked him to take a close look at the defendants, and Mr. Roe said they appeared different from the men he had encountered that night.

He went on to say that the only reason he picked the pictures out of the photo lineup is that the police threatened to beat him if he did not tell them what they wanted to hear.

“They were peer-pressuring me,” he testified. “I just wanted to get out of there.”

An Open Case

In interviews for this article, Mr. Roe said that the police had threatened him and urged him to lie in his initial interviews, and to the grand jury. He maintains that gang members never specifically threatened him, but Judy M. Gagliano, the lead homicide prosecutor in Essex County, said Mr. Roe’s about-face on the witness stand was so abrupt and contradictory that she has no doubt he had been pressured to change his story.

“It’s pretty obvious that someone must have gotten to him,” she said. “And the frustrating part is that he never told us or gave us a chance to relocate him or protect him.”

Mr. Roe’s lawyer, Raymond Morasse, attributed his client’s inconsistent statements simply to different prosecutors asking different questions at different stages.

“They’re punishing the exact type of person, the exact type of witness they need in these cases — someone who tries to help, and who actually shows up to testify,” Mr. Morasse said. “They need to assure these people that they’ll be safe when they do the right thing, safe from the gang members and from retaliation by the police and prosecutors if the case doesn’t turn out the way they want.”

As the case against Mr. Roe proceeds, with a hearing scheduled in September, the murder of Michael Taylor remains an open case, with no arrests, no reliable witnesses.

Mr. Upshaw and Mr. Pearson ultimately pleaded guilty to ordering the two killings in retaliation for the bar fight, and started seven-year prison sentences this spring.

But in calculating the consequences of witness intimidation, the police say that if Mr. Roe and others had cooperated, they would have been behind bars months before the bar brawl — and the four murders it prompted.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.